In a previous article we were talking about the response that the Wine development team gave before the news that Ubuntu developers gave to stop supporting and creating 32-bit packages from the next Ubuntu version, which is Ubuntu 19.10.
Well, all this turmoil that has occurred around this news that they gave in Canonical during this week, has generated various criticisms and above all discontent with the community.
This arose because the reason for the termination of support for the i386 architecture that Canonical gives is the inability to maintain packages at the level of other architectures supported by Ubuntu due to insufficient level of support in Linux kernel, tools and browsers.
En particular, the latest developments in the area of improving safety and protection against critical vulnerabilities are no longer developed in a timely manner for x86 32-bit systems and are only available for a 64-bit architecture.
Two of the greats in Linux have already come out to answer, one of them the Wine team and behind them Steam.
Valve will not give Steam support to Ubuntu 19.10
And what is that recently a Valve employee, “Pierre-Loup Griffais”, pitched Valve's position against what Canonical has in mind, this answer was given on Twitter tonight, which you can see here.
Ubuntu 19.10 and future releases will not be officially supported by Steam or recommended to our users. We will evaluate ways to minimize breakage for existing users, but will also switch our focus to a different distribution, currently TBD.
- Pierre-Loup Griffais (@ Plagman2) June 22, 2019
And it is that apparently, the talks between Ubuntu and Valve to solve the problem from removing 32bit / Multiarch library from Ubuntu 19.10 they have failedas they are not officially supported by Ubuntu or are not recommending it to their users in the future. They are now exploring new distributions to adopt instead.
Plus a developer at Canonicahe, Alan Pope (AKA, Popey), I was trying to increase awareness of the problems that an average user would face without 32-bit support.
Since this Canonical developer did an experiment on launching games from the GOG catalog on a trial version of Ubuntu 19.10 without 32-bit libraries with Wine64.
As a result, of the 6 randomly selected games tested that work in Wine with 32-bit libraries, in Wine64, not a single game worked.
In particular, it was not possible to achieve the installation of three games (Theme Hospital, Quake The Offer, Shadow Warrior), one game did not start (GOG Braid) and the remaining two (FTL Advanced Edition, GOG Surgeon Simulator 2013) were limited to show a black screen (maybe from - Due to limitations of OpenGL support in VirtualBox).
Which shows that most GOG (Good Old Games) games stopped working on Ubuntu 19.10, making it seem as if the rest of the Canonical developers did absolutely no testing at all before saying they would stop giving support for 32-bit packages.
Since as we mentioned in the previous article:
And it is not by mere whim of the developers of Wine, but that as current versions of Wine for 64-bit distributions are based on Wine32 and require 32-bit libraries.
Typically, in 64-bit environments the required 32-bit libraries are shipped in multiarch packages, but on Ubuntu it was decided to stop creating such libraries entirely.
The reason for this is quite easy to understand: many Windows applications continue to use 32-bit code in whole or in part.
If Canonical continues with its unveiled plans, it will be without the support of two of the greats in a matter of months.
This without saying the projects that are also derived from Wine, such as PlayOnLinux and also happening to affect Crossover users.
In addition to the fact that in the case of Steam users, things change, because as they will know with the help of their Proton project, many users enjoy their titles that are native to Windows in Ubuntu or its derivatives.
This problem could cause a large number of users to decline for alternate distributions.
NO, neither Ubuntu leaves support for 32-bit packages nor Valve stops supporting Steam in Ubuntu, it's all a misunderstanding:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/06/is-ubuntu-not-dropping-32-bit-app-support-after-all
Ubuntu is getting worse and slower ... especially since the blessed Gnome 3 came out; if kde is increasingly bad as a desktop and without konqueror, ubuntu and gnome are not far behind!
Nothing is understood, that does a bad thing to the community, if it were only a misunderstanding it would be just as bad. And the second thing is that if it were for steam I don't care and as I don't see a title today that is really worth it! Nor that Valve did everything possible to make companies move to Vulkan earning a little less for using linux »steam». I still hope that google sells video games on its platform, in case they did not do so well but if it can sell them locally, we may have a serious competitor to steam.
The second thing is that I agree with killing x86 but not in this way, at least trying to motivate them to leave or repair their x64 versions and using appimage or some other, I am already rotten from the libraries if that ends here.